The 84-minute Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre filters the horrifying and historically fascinating tale of what unfortunately became known as the Guyana tragedy through the lens of the women who planned, coordinated and carried out the 1978 massacre, which left 918 men, women and children dead. Though it aired on cable TV’s A&E, I watched it on Apple TV streaming. The program purports to focus on four women, Marceline Jones, Carolyn Layton, Maria Katsaris and Annie Moore, and their impact on the People’s Temple and its founder, the Rev. Jim Jones.
A&E marketing calls the massacre a “tragic end”.
But the November 18, 1978 act of mass murder and suicide was more of an attack than a tragedy, a distinction Americans still fail to make 40 years later. Though more detailed than advertised and not exactly focused on the women as much as it claims, Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre certainly accounts for each of the four women, scattering clues, facts and segments across its run time. Drawing from key readings of highlighted documents, extensive audio clips with subtitles and exclusive interviews with Jonestown survivors and family members, including Jones’ biological son, as well as never-before-seen archival footage and photos, it retraces the timeline. I remember when this happened — days after Iran’s Moslem dictatorship seized the American embassy in Teheran — and followed various dramas and documentaries about this historic application of religion to reality. I learned new information, so this one is worth watching.
A&E’s Jonestown: The Women Behind the Massacre
Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre starts with an overview of the women’s roles within the church from its explicitly multiculturalist origins in the Midwest to its insidious spread and rise in the Sixties in Northern California, where so many death cults, such as the Manson Family, Black Panthers and the Symbionese Liberation Army, festered and originated. While it’s not included here, I recall reading that the era’s Jane Fonda had at some point declared herself an enthusiast for the People’s Temple, sharing the Reverend Jones’ faith in collectivism, socialism and social justice. These are their terms, not mine, and the most compelling aspect of this movement and program is how it made and tracks a religion out of the climax of the New Left, down to its environmentalism and multiculturalism. Forty years after their loved ones were slaughtered, Americans continue to equivocate about the evil of these ideals.
“[T]his [New Left] ideal had become instead this insular, paranoid, violent community”, Hearing the Voices of Jonestown author Mary Maaga asserts without accounting for her use of the word instead in this sentence. Of course New Left dogma became mass death but this documentary doesn’t identify, let alone examine, the philosophical roots of Jonestown.
Instead,Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre delves into facts, withholding analysis and judgment, documenting Jones’ drug addiction and sex orgies, as the Church preyed upon the Midwest’s and California’s poor and black families and becoming a model for future cult leaders, sects and swarms of militant religious women and sister-wives. As the People’s Temple herd dodges family lawsuits and concerns with a move to Guyana in South America, Jones fights for custody of one of the children he may have fathered, which is a catalyst to media scrutiny. With complicit parents as pawns, believing in social justice as their children work in the Guyana commune toward mass death, the four women plan and coordinate the mass murder-suicide, which began on that black day with the socialist commune’s parents giving their children cyanide-laced Kool-Aid. The women had ordered the poison and tested it on pigs before Congressman Leo Ryan’s constituent welfare check on Nov. 18.
With footage from the day of the massacre, which does not (and should) include video of the People’s Temple members’ military gun massacre on the congressman and practitioners (here, they’re called “defectors”) trying to escape the compound, Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre shows that what one person calls “the most peaceful, loving community” suddenly, chillingly executes its highest morality: altruism. Another adherent praises Jonestown because there were “no cars”. Viewers should note that the preachings and practices at Jonestown are widely accepted today. Suicide and murder for the sake of earth, God, or others on a large scale was shocking in 1978.
It is not shocking now.
Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre reports on the women who strategized, schemed and made the massacre possible, reminding everyone 40 years after the People’s Temple’s mass death that, while it’s easy to overestimate Stalin, Hitler, Khomeini, Arafat, Mao and other mass murderers such as the Rev. Jim Jones, women (and men) who sanction, support and teach them are also guilty. A&E’s Jonestown: The Women Behind The Massacre, explicitly names the evil that these women did — they systematically conceived and activated the mass slaughter of innocents. That this account is predominantly made by survivors and scholars who are women is incidental.
Roy Moore, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate from Alabama, may be elected to the U.S. Congress one month from today. This is an alarming prospect for many reasons. Recent claims reported by the Washington Post are the weakest reasons to reject Moore’s candidacy and I fear that the Post, in pursuing the apparently well-researched story in the wake of recently lowered journalistic standards by the New York Times and the New Yorker — hit pieces which launched a wave of articles about unconfirmed sex claims and unsubstantiated allegations, leading to a purge of powerful men — diverts attention from Moore’s worst ideas. But that’s another topic.
Moore is the judge who was essentially removed from Alabama’s State Supreme Court twice when he violated American law; in 2003 when he refused to remove a statue of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse and earlier this year when Moore urged judges to defy federal orders regarding same-sex marriage, which Roy Moore has stated he regards as worse than slavery.
Moore has also asserted in 2005 that homosexuality should be against the law.
As founder and president of the Foundation for Moral Law, a religious charity from which he arranged to collect $1 million in payments from 2007 through 2012, the religious fundamentalist has been nicknamed the “Ayatollah of Alabama” for actively seeking to impose religion in government. Moore, who won a kickboxing championship, went to work in Australia on a cattle ranch and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, admitted in his autobiography that he was so reviled by his fellow U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War that he slept on sandbags to avoid having explosives tossed under his cot.
Like President Trump, who has endorsed the former judge, Moore was a lifelong Democrat until he switched parties and became a Republican.
Unlike the president, however, the Alabama native is a religionist who consistently advocates mixing government in religion and religion in government. When Moore installed a Ten Commandments plaque behind his judicial bench, he did so on the grounds that, as he later told The Atlantic, he wanted to establish his religion, Christianity, as the moral foundation of U.S. law. Then-Judge Moore also began court sessions with a prayer. Moore’s illegal actions lead to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) challenging Moore’s courtroom prayers and Ten Commandments display as unconstitutional.
When Moore later unveiled a Ten Commandments monument, he praised: “…God upon whom this nation and our laws were founded” which is totally false. A lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court asking that the monument be removed because it “sends a message to all who enter the State Judicial Building that the government encourages and endorses the practice of religion in general and Judeo-Christianity in particular”. But Moore insisted that he would not remove the Ten Commandments monument. Moore was ultimately removed from the judiciary.
In the defeat, on November 18, 2002, federal U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson had made his decision that the monument violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, declaring Roy Moore’s religious monument unconstitutional:
If all Chief Justice Moore had done were to emphasize the Ten Commandments’ historical and educational importance… or their importance as a model code for good citizenship … this court would have a much different case before it. But the Chief Justice did not limit himself to this; he went far, far beyond. He installed a two-and-a-half ton monument in the most prominent place in a government building, managed with dollars from all state taxpayers, with the specific purpose and effect of establishing a permanent recognition of the ‘sovereignty of God,’ the Judeo-Christian God, over all citizens in this country, regardless of each taxpaying citizen’s individual personal beliefs or lack thereof. To this, the Establishment Clause says no.”
The judge’s correct ruling, serious flaws aside, merely inflamed the wrath of Roy Moore’s faith and, this summer, Moore suggested that the September 11, 2001 attack by Islamic terrorists was God’s punishment for Americans losing faith, though he’s also blamed sodomy and abortion for Americans’ suffering. Roy Moore reserves a particular disdain for homosexuality, which he regards as an evil which should be illegal. “Homosexual behavior is … a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one’s ability to describe it.” When asked in 2015 whether he believes that sex between persons of the same sex should be punished by death, Roy Moore declined to provide an explicit answer, equivocating with: “Well I don’t, you know, I’m not here to outline any punishments for sodomy.”
Any serious candidate who would leave doubt as to whether he seeks to enact laws to put adults to death for having consensual sex is a monster deserving total and absolute scorn and the most emphatic denunciation from statesmen, intellectuals and every moral American. Insinuating that he thinks gays deserve to die and stating clearly and explicitly that he aims to enact a religious government disqualify Moore from political office. Whatever moral transgressions he’s made in his sexual past, including his alleged assault and proclivity for sex with children, Roy Moore’s election to the Senate on December 12, 2017, would mark a black day in U.S. history. If Moore wins, his election will be a victory for religious statism and another chilling step toward dictatorship.
The Pope’s visit to the United States of America, the first by Pope Francis, expressed explicit hatred for individualism, capitalism and the ideals that make America great. The assault was enveloped in platitudes. But, as I wrote when the South American Jesuit priest rose to power in 2013 (read the post here), he speaks of reform in order only to enforce dark, ancient and primitive beliefs.
In itself, this is not surprising. Neither is it shocking that obedient crowds lined American city boulevards, roaring and chanting in praise of the pope’s anti-Americanism. In Washington, DC, New York City and the nation’s first capital, Philadelphia, the pope’s message unleashed an equally obedient media unifying leftists and conservatives alike.
Indeed, the press largely disdained the idea of protest and praised the Catholic Church’s vicar of Christ without even the pretense of objectivity. Brian Williams, returning to the airwaves, did the best job of explaining the event as a news event, breaking logistics down as the visit paralyzed America’s largest eastern cities, though he, too, reported without doubt, question or scrutiny. At least Williams, in his first NBC News appearance since being suspended for an admission of deception, examined whether the New York Times had in its papal analysis been biased toward the left. But most in the media simply bowed to the pope.
That’s putting it lightly. I had to search for the smallest sign of an independent voice of dissent or reason to the massive, crippling, state-sponsored mobilization of police and paramilitary units to patrol, control and lock down major U.S. cities on behalf of a religious figure. One article reported “[a] chaotic scene outside Madison Square Garden, where travellers with suitcases struggled past security to get in and out of Penn station [as]…Unholy cries of “holy Mary” and “Jesus Christ” filled the air. Apparently, one frustrated woman cried: “Why is everything blocked off if he isn’t even outside?” The Washington Post reported on the Philadelphia leg of the tour that “[t]he birthplace of American liberty was on virtual lockdown to greet [Pope] Francis.” But all of that came within the wider context of unfiltered endorsement of everything the Pope said, did and sought.
Those abused by Catholic leaders heard little or nothing from the pope who otherwise railed against abuse of power in speech after speech. “It’s a tough week to be a victim,” Barbara Dorris, spokeswoman for Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, told one newspaper. “They feel like once again they’ve been forgotten.”
Instead, in homilies at mass and various speeches, including the first papal address to a joint meeting of Congress, Pope Francis stressed the collective over the individual, self-abnegation over self-interest and, above all, mysticism over reason.
Almost every speech emphasized what he calls “the common good”. In his historic speech to the United Nations General Assembly, he denounced “unrestrained ambitions and collective forms of selfishness”, unequivocally stating that the ultimate goal is to grant all countries, without exception, a share in—and a genuine and equitable influence on—other sovereign nations’ decision-making. Pope Francis demanded of the world body new rights for “the vast ranks of the excluded.” He openly declared opposition to capitalism, which he has derided as having the stench of “the dung of the devil”, and he asserted a new, mystical “right of the environment”.
Pope Francis told the United Nations:
We Christians, together with the other monotheistic religions, believe that the universe is the fruit of a loving decision by the Creator, who permits man respectfully to use creation for the good of his fellow men and for the glory of the Creator; he is not authorized to abuse it, much less to destroy it. In all religions, the environment is a fundamental good.
The fundamental bad, according to this new pope, is “a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity”, which, properly speaking, describes every decent and honest human quest for productive achievement. What artist, producer or entrepreneur has in mind a specific boundary for his creative pursuit and prosperity? Do Brad Pitt and Taylor Swiftseek only so much power over their own works and no more? Only so much money for a song or movie and not more than that? Do they exist for the sake of others at the expense of themselves? More to the point, should they? The Pope says Yes, but the civilized answer is No. Not for the egoist who seeks the pursuit of happiness, which means: one’s own, personal happiness. Did Steve Jobs live for the sake of others and put bounds on the power of Apple and what he sought to conceive, design and produce—with a cap on Apple’s profit?
What is the likelihood that you would know who he was if he had?
What the pope who says that he has not watched television in 25 years derides as a “culture of waste” is a culture of creation; America and the West are, at their best, a marvelous, new, industrial means, based on capitalism and individual rights, of production, distribution and profit for the individual, whether as a new song, movie or technology. Thanks to Steve Jobs, for example, when today’s consumer speaks of an ecosystem, he speaks of a new way of creating, consuming and leveraging for his own sake a photograph, document, communication, note, feature, calculation or audiovisual show across multiple platforms.
Pope Francis insists that Apple—and every person or company—”must do everything possible to ensure that all can have the minimum spiritual and material means needed to live in dignity and to create and support a family…” In practical terms, Pope Francis says that everyone on earth must sacrifice to provide others with “lodging, labor, and land…”
After reasserting this Catholic dogma, i.e., that the good is to suffer while sacrificing for the sake of others and die, rather than to enjoy yourself for your own sake and live, Pope Francis addressed what he calls “the destruction of all mankind”. He endorsed Obama’s Iran deal as “proof of the potential of political good will” citing what he—who has faith in a supernatural being and in himself as a substitute for God—calls “hard evidence”.
Both the Pope’s zeal for an Islamic dictatorship’s achievement of nuclear power and his anti-capitalism are rooted in his belief that the meaning of one’s life “is found in selfless service to others and in the sage and respectful use of creation for the common good.” In short, the good, even the less linear “common” good, is whatever is good for others, even if the others chant “Death to America!” as they rush to get weapons of mass death and destruction.
Finally, faced with real, hard evidence of mass death and destruction at the site where the World Trade Center once stood, the pope refused to name and identify those who attacked, Islamic terrorists from Saudi Arabia, let alone name and identify the religion that motivates them, Islam. In fact, he never mentioned that the initiation of force came from those moved by religion. The fallen, he implied, are merely symbols “of the inability to find solutions which respect the common good.” Pope Francis did not denounce the act of war itself during his remarks at the place where the Twin Towers collapsed. He pointedly offered no praise for the innocent who were mass murdered on September 11, 2001. Instead, he made reference to those who helped others, the so-called “first responders”. The first murdered, he implied, by not singling them out for recognition and not naming their murderers, may have deserved it. After all, they worked in the World Trade Center, a place to trade for one’s self-interest.
Of the only nation specifically founded on the right to pursue one’s happiness being explicitly founded as a secular republic based on individual rights, not upon Judeo-Christianity, dogma or dictatorship, the pope in his many speeches, prayers and homilies said nothing positive. As Time magazine reports, Pope Francis removed from his prepared speech to Congress the single reference to the philosophy that makes America the greatest nation on earth:
Here I think of the political history of the United States, where democracy is deeply rooted in the mind [sic] of the American people. All political activity must serve and promote the good of the human person and be based on respect for his or her dignity. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776).”
Jettisoning recognition of America’s independence did not diminish the pope’s appeal, as leftists such as Fox News analyst Juan Williams and New York City Mayor De Blasio and conservatives such as those on Fox News and in the Heritage Foundation raved about the religious visit. There were a few exceptions, besides Objectivists, including talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, who noted the pope’s anti-capitalism, and columnist George Will, who warned against any religious leader moralizing about domestic policy in America.
But most Americans appear to agree with Geraldine Quinones, a woman who said she won a lottery ticket to see the Pope, adding that she regards the win as “the luck of the Lord”. “We’re lucky to have him here,” she told a newspaper. “I think he’s going to change everything.” By making explicit many Americans’ steadfast dedication to selfless ethics and faith, the anti-American Pope Francis arguably is changing everything already, moving the nation faster toward—and serving as the prophet for—doom, spreading faster, wider acceptance of the same ideas taking us there.
The cost of the papal visit, according to a financial analysis which concludes that the multimillion dollar “national security event” ultimately will be paid largely by U.S. taxpayers, without their consent, is in line to be overdue from “everybody but the Vatican.”
What did Americans get in return? Besides another anti-American assault from the head of the Vatican complete with endorsements of a Kentucky mystic and monk who sought to mix religions in faith and a socialist who praised Marx, Lenin and Mao, Pope Francis delivered an explicitly anti-human line in one of his sermons when he said: “As far as goodness and purity of heart are concerned, we human beings don’t have much to show.” So it is that Americans fell for the faithfully, hatefully, hypocritically anti-capitalist pope who rode in the back of a small car when he was wasn’t riding on helicopters and jet planes while denouncing technology and selfishness as he pleaded to the newly obedient American minions to: “Pray for me.”
The antidote to the past six days of faith-based, anti-Americanism is to think for yourself and for yourself.
The Pope has reportedly proposed a merger with Hollywood.
According to an industry trade publication report, Pope Francis wrote to top movie industry players and pitched a conference on influencing movies, television and show business to spread faith, religion and positive views of the Catholic Church. The proposed meeting, which the Pope apparently wants to include a powerful agent with connections to the Obama administration, would convene at the Vatican this fall.
Among those apparently on the invitation list are the brother of Chicago Mayor and ex-Clinton and Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel, Ari Emanuel, and his co-CEO at William Morris Endeavor, Patrick Whitesell, producer Brian Grazer (Inside Deep Throat), Oprah Winfrey (Selma), Matt Damon (Hereafter) and industry titan David Geffen. Pope Francis seeks to discuss “how the church is perceived by Western media influencers and ways to improve its portrayal in entertainment” according to the report, which also notes that the Vatican is apparently working with the nonprofit Varkey Foundation, a charity launched by Bill Clinton with ties to UNICEF, Oxfam, an Arab state, Amnesty International, the Clinton Global Initiative (Bill and Hillary Clinton‘s troubled charity) and something called the Tony Blair Faith Foundation.
It’s bad enough that Big Government is expanding its pernicious influence and intervention in Hollywood, as I wrote when Mrs. Obama intruded upon the Oscars, and the mixture of Hollywood, faith and religion is not new, but an official convergence of faith, religion and state with the entertainment industry is truly a putrid notion to any respectable artist, studio or legitimate show business. Whatever the merits of their work and whatever their collectivist-altruist political philosophy, these titans of one of America’s greatest industries, with its dismal record of standing for individual rights including the freedom of speech unmolested by the state—especially a religious state—ought to break with its track record and reject this proposal in the strongest possible terms.
Pushing faith, religion and their strong influence on statism into movies, TV, publishing and music is an abomination which calls to mind Clinton’s proposed V-chip, the Moral Majority, Tipper Gore and the endless campaign of puritanical fascists such as feminist Gloria Steinem and traditionalist Phyllis Schlafly to impose the equivalent of speech codes, censorship—and today’s insidious version, a ban on “hate speech”—on everything Americans see, watch, read and listen to. Better artists and show business industrialists than this bunch ought to speak out against the Pope’s proposal. Bad ideas silently sanctioned by the worst purveyors of sludge and mediocrity can infect the rest of Hollywood. Having Winfrey, Geffen and Grazer bow before whatever robed mystic runs the Vatican this fall may pre-determine—and contaminate—what you read, watch and consume next fall and in the future.
Everyone decent in Hollywood (and the West), whatever his personal beliefs, should defend the principle of free expression and urge Hollywood to reject the Pope’s proposal to influence and propagandize the movie industry. In other words, speak up for freedom and turn the Pope down.
Naming himself after St. Francis of Assisi, a Catholic who claimed that he answered God’s call to “repair my church in ruins”, a 76-year-old priest from South America became the first Jesuit pope yesterday and, breaking from small, hierarchical rituals, reminded the world that people currently want to believe, i.e. have faith, more than they want to choose to think, i.e., follow reason. Contrary to those who claim that it doesn’t matter, the Catholic Church is meaningless, etc., the naming of the new pope is, I think, a serious new sign that civilization is in trouble.
It’s not that this pope—who is accused of aiding and abetting a dictatorship in his native Argentina, which he apparently as much as admits to doing, which is hardly surprising in a country that welcomed Nazis after World War 2—is hostile to sex without procreation, such as homosexuality and contraception, or that he is as contemptuous of capitalism as Barack Obama or his nagging wife Michelle. The sign stems from the fact that, as far as I can tell, most people are choosing to ignore or evade the overwhelming evidence that the Catholic Church, which is paying out millions of dollars in settlements to people who credibly claim to have been sexually abused as children by priests operating within a system that’s apparently influenced or ruled by a secretly repressed sex cabal, is 100 percent corrupt and immoral.
That people—conservatives, leftists, otherwise rational people of all types, judging by social and mainstream media—really want to believe is not astonishing. We are regressing, not progressing, and besides a New Left president, we now have a “Third World” pope who chose to emulate St. Francis because, according to a Vatican spokesman, he has a “special place in his heart and his ministry for the poor, for the disenfranchised, [and] for those living on the fringes and facing injustice.” These last two words, were real justice possible among Catholics, should mean those who toil, struggle and strive to make money and live honest, rational lives in pursuit of their own selfish happiness; be they any color, sex or economic status. But no one has any reason to think that Pope Francis will spare condemnation of those who seek to profit and act selfishly here on earth and we have every reason to think that he will not. Instead, Pope Francis should be expected to change the Catholic Church only in order to fix what he believes is broken – which is to say make it a more consistent organ for spreading altruism and other rotten ideals.
At that, secular and rational people should not snicker at Pope Francis, who may, like his predecessor, be a transitional figure, or wonder how anyone can take him seriously. The point is that they do—more than ever—and those of us who reject Judeo-Christianity, religion and mysticism ought to stop snickering, get serious about fighting the irrationality that’s engulfing the world, advocate for a philosophy of living on earth and live by example—including by means of rational, not pedantic or dogmatic, activism—a rational alternative to a life of submission. The fact of Pope Francis is an ominous, not humorous, sign that we are running out of time.
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As founder and president of the Foundation for Moral Law, a religious charity from which he arranged to collect $1 million in payments from 2007 through 2012, the religious fundamentalist has been nicknamed the “Ayatollah of Alabama” for actively seeking to impose religion in government. Moore, who won a kickboxing championship, went to work in Australia on a cattle ranch and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, admitted in his autobiography that he was so reviled by his fellow U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War that he slept on sandbags to avoid having explosives tossed under his cot.
When Moore later unveiled a Ten Commandments monument, he praised: “…God upon whom this nation and our laws were founded” which is totally false. A lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court asking that the monument be removed because it “sends a message to all who enter the State Judicial Building that the government encourages and endorses the practice of religion in general and Judeo-Christianity in particular”. But Moore insisted that he would not remove the Ten Commandments monument. Moore was ultimately removed from the judiciary.
